Over the weekend, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York unsealed a complaint against Mohammad Yousef Hasna, a Turkish national who also goes by Orhan Korkmaz and Abu Al-Baraa, accusing him of funneling money and supplies to Hamas through what the complaint calls simply a “Sham Charity.” Neither the full complaint nor the Justice Department’s own announcement names the organization. I thought I’d rectify that.

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Cross-referencing the complaint’s details against UK Charity Commission filings and public records points to one organization, Al-Khair Foundation, a UK-registered charity headquartered in Croydon. The complaint says the charity was founded around 2003, pivoted from Islamic education into emergency relief in 2005, and bought a television network in 2009 to raise its profile.

Al-Khair’s own history matches those milestones, and the money lines up too. Charity Commission filings show gross income of £31.28 million for the year ending July 2023 and £60.98 million the year after, which convert almost exactly to the $41.8 million and $81.56 million the complaint cites for those same two years.

Hilariously enough, Hasna confirmed it himself via his LinkedIn profile, which lists him as Global Director of country offices at Al-Khair Foundation, and a bio he wrote years ago describes his prior job as Gaza Coordination Office Director at the OIC’s Humanitarian Affairs Department, the exact post the complaint says he held before joining the charity.

Israeli Intelligence Already Flagged Al-Khair

The Israeli military put Al-Khair’s name on this directly, over two years before this indictment existed. A July 2024 IDF release said it had killed Hossam Mansour, a platoon commander in Hamas’ Internal Security Forces, and named him in the same statement as one of the directors of Al-Khair Foundation, which it said transfers funds to terrorist groups under cover of humanitarian work.

A second Al-Khair figure, Adham Abu Salmiya, the foundation’s marketing director in Istanbul, spent years before that as a spokesman for the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, and describes himself in his own biography as a supporter of armed resistance.

Ties to the UN, Because of Course

Naturally, Al-Khair is also closely tied to the Hamas-infested UNRWA. In 2015, at a ceremony in Brussels, Al-Khair signed a memorandum of understanding with UNRWA and handed over an initial £500,000 contribution, worth about $777,000 at the time, arriving right as UNRWA faced a funding shortfall threatening to delay opening its schools that year. Schools — might I remind you — that teach jihad, antisemitism, and violence. UNRWA touted Al-Khair as “among the largest Muslim charities in the UK.”

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U.S.-Based Nonprofit Collaborating with Al-Khair?

What should matter most to American readers is that the DOJ complaint quotes Hasna discussing a plan to route purchases through an unnamed charity headquartered in the United States, which would buy goods and resell them to Al-Khair.

The complaint doesn’t name that charity. But it’s highly concerning that there is an American organization in the picture that knew full well about Al-Khair’s ties and kept working with them anyways. I hope they’re on the FBI’s radar as well.

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Over the past several days, I’ve been having a public exchange on X with Alex Bruesewitz, a senior Trump advisor and the CEO of X Strategies LLC. Bruesewitz has been deeply embedded in the Trump world for years. He helped run key elements of the 2024 campaign’s social media and podcast strategy, arranged high-profile celebrity endorsements and White House events, and continues to run Trump-aligned messaging operations through his firm.

He was reportedly offered the role of White House new-media director after the election but chose to stay in his private-sector position, where he retains substantial influence over messaging and access. With a track record of shaping narratives inside the MAGA ecosystem, his voice carries weight in administration-adjacent circles (especially as he jockeys for influence in a potential JD Vance administration come 2028). For those who might not remember Alex, the Wall Street Journal is here to reminder you:

Our spat didn’t revolve around marijuana, but the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) — a 1938 law that requires anyone doing paid political work for a foreign principal to disclose it publicly. Specifically, we were discussing a massive contract, which has been valued at $45 million, between a firm called Clock Tower and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in which Clock Tower was retained to help produce content that would improve Americans’ perception of Israel.

He’s framed his criticism of that contract as part of a broader, principled stand against all foreign influence operations on social media, not just Israel’s. He’s said, in various forms, that he opposes such efforts “from any country,” whether Russia, China, India, Qatar, or elsewhere. Israel’s, he argues, is simply the largest and most visible example so far, and therefore the one drawing his focus.

When pressed — repeatedly, directly, and with specific examples — to name even one other foreign-funded social media operation he’s currently pushing back against, he’s offered no substantive answer. He’s deflected, ignored the question, or turned it back on me. Across multiple days and direct challenges, that’s hard to square with the principle he claims to hold.

The Initial Exchange and the Transparency Question

It began in earnest on July 15, when Bruesewitz amplified reporting on the Clock Tower/Parscale contract and questioned its transparency. He highlighted contract language about “integrat[ing] narrative messaging into Salem Media properties” and a promised minimum of 5,000 pieces of content per month with guaranteed view counts, asking whether those deliverables still stood.

I responded by asking why he excessively focuses on Israel, to which he responded by questioning whether I myself was part of the campaign and paid by Clock Tower.

We went back and forth several times. I directly asked Bruesewitz which other foreign-funded social media operations he was currently targeting besides the Israeli one. He had already stated publicly that “every country” engages in these activities and that he opposes them all.

His reply focused on his personal expertise in social media and expressed a general desire to see foreign money removed from U.S. politics. He did not name a single other example.

I followed up by noting the contrast with Qatar’s AJ+ network — an outlet based in Washington, D.C., with dozens of employees, that has racked up tens of billions of social media views while openly promoting content hostile to American institutions. The Department of Justice ordered AJ+ to register under FARA in 2020; it has refused to do so for more than six years.

Bruesewitz has not responded to the AJ+ point in any of our exchanges.

I tried explaining, with detailed evidence from the actual FARA filings, that Clock Tower has submitted 193 filings since registering roughly ten months ago. One supplemental filing from May 18, 2026, alone contains a 28-page itemized breakdown of spending, including specific advertising payments to Salem Media Representatives totaling over $250,000, along with dated links to the actual content produced. This level of granular disclosure is exceptionally rare among FARA registrants. Most foreign agents file far less — or nothing at all for extended periods.

Bruesewitz did not engage substantively with those filings. Instead, he continued to assert a lack of transparency without addressing the documented records.

On July 18, the pattern continued. I posted a direct question asking for an example of another foreign-funded social media operation he was working against.

His response was to ask me to “point him in the direction of some contracts from other countries that specifically focus on social media services with the goal of shaping American public opinion.”

Later that same day, I asked again which specific countries he was referring to when he claimed that “many countries” spend more than Israel on social media influence efforts. Hehas not answered.

A Pattern of Deflection

Across several days of public questioning, Bruesewitz has:

• Claimed broad opposition to foreign influence operations from any country.

• Focused his public criticism almost exclusively on one Israel-linked contract.

• Received specific, documented examples of other high-impact operations, most notably AJ+.

• Been asked repeatedly to name even one other social media-focused foreign influence effort he is currently challenging.

• Responded either by ignoring the question, deflecting, or asking the questioner to do the work of identifying examples.

This isn’t the behavior of someone applying a consistent standard. Bruesewitz named Russia, China, India, and Qatar himself as countries he’d also oppose — then, given several days and every opening to name one of them for real, he named none. A principle that never survives contact with an actual example isn’t a principle. It’s essentially just cover for the one target he picked from the start.

As a side note, this also matters because for the past week, Bruesewitz has been going after anyone critical of VP Vance or the administration’s foreign policy. He wrote directly to the employer of commentator Jaimee Michell after she criticized Vance, in what was clearly an attempt to get her fired. Separately, he suggested that critics of President Trump’s potential sale of F-35 fighter jet parts to Turkey — or really any criticism of President Trump or VP Vance — as being part of a “coordinated effort.”

Vance retailed this very talking point Joe Rogan’s podcast.

But anyways, back to the matter at hand. I’m not defending the Clock Tower contract, and I’m not arguing Israel should be exempt from scrutiny. I’m asking that the scrutiny be applied evenly. Bruesewitz had every chance to show that it is, and hasn’t taken one of them.

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The record is public and linked throughout, so none of this requires taking my word for it. What it shows isn’t a man applying a consistent standard. It’s a man who found one acceptable target and stopped looking.

Key Findings

“American Doctor,” opening in theaters August 14, presents Feroze Sidhwa as a neutral American physician with no personal stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That framing doesn’t survive contact with his own record:

• Sidhwa has told MSNBC he has no connection to the conflict whatsoever, yet his own writing going back to 2007 describes decades of activism rooted in what he himself has called a Zoroastrian religious duty to oppose Israel, alongside years spent editing books and essays for Hamas-sympathizing academic Norman Finkelstein.

• He has repeatedly and specifically denied ever seeing Hamas inside Gaza’s hospitals, telling the BBC that in his account no one who has ever set foot in Gaza has witnessed it. The record at every hospital where he has volunteered says otherwise.

• At European Hospital, where Sidhwa insists he saw no trace of Hamas, the IDF says it found a Hamas tunnel running directly beneath the building, the same tunnel where senior Hamas leader Muhammad Sinwar was killed in a May 2025 strike, along with the bodies of other terrorists and a cache of weapons and intelligence material.

• At Nasser Hospital, Sidhwa himself confirmed on Democracy Now that one of two people killed in a March 2025 strike on a recovery room was Ismail Barhoum, the man the IDF identifies as Hamas’s prime minister in Gaza, and argued the strike was illegal anyway. Freed Israeli hostages say they were held inside that same hospital, and Hamas’s own Interior Ministry ran policing operations out of it.

• The personal website that now anchors Sidhwa’s media career, complete with a press kit, went live on the exact day his New York Times op-ed was published in October 2024, suggesting the “reluctant-witness” persona was a planned rollout rather than an accident of timing.

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Dr. Sidhwa’s Rise to Celebrity

This August, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa arrives in American movie theaters. He is one of three physicians at the center of American Doctor, a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and begins its U.S. theatrical run on August 14, opening in New York and Toronto before expanding to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities through September.

Distributed by Watermelon Pictures and directed by Poh Si Teng, formerly a documentary commissioner for Qatar’s state-run Al Jazeera English, the film follows Sidhwa alongside Palestinian-American emergency physician Thaer Ahmad and Jewish orthopedic surgeon Mark Perlmutter as they volunteer in Gaza’s hospitals and then return home to lobby Congress and press their case against Israel in the American media.

The film’s title is also its thesis.

Men with ostensibly no ethnic, religious, or national stake in the conflict, moved to speak out by nothing more than what they witnessed in the operating room. “We do not have to accept that as Americans,” Sidhwa says in the trailer. “The United States could stop sending jet fuel, bombs, all sorts of weapons.” He’s simply an American, with no dog in the fight. It’s the same line he’s been retailing ever since his infamous New York Times op-ed came out in late 2024, in which he alleged—without any convincing evidence—that the IDF was wantonly gunning down Palestinian children in Gaza en masse.

It’s also untrue.

Far from a disinterested medic who wandered into a war zone, he is a lifelong anti-Israel activist with a deep religious conviction and a paper trail stretching back nearly two decades—someone who has spent years working alongside some of the most notorious figures in the movement to destroy Israel, before mounting a carefully orchestrated campaign to launder himself into the mainstream. The film is only the largest stage that campaign has reached so far.

To call him “uninvolved,” as he still insists he is, is about as far from the truth as one can get.

But first, let’s begin with the op-ed that put him on the map.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa Is Far from “Uninvolved”

During an interview on MSNBC, Dr. Sidhwa stated that he has “no connection to the Israel–Palestine conflict. I’m not Jewish, I’m not Israeli, I’m not Palestinian, I’m not Arab, I’m not Muslim, and I’m not Christian. I have no connection to it whatsoever—other than the fact that I’m American.” This is a recurring theme in his advocacy, meant to persuade other “uninvolved” Americans to join his cause.

After conducting my own research, I found Dr. Sidhwa’s repeated claim of being an uninvolved party with no stake in the conflict to be wildly dishonest. In fact, he personally acknowledges a deep Zoroastrian religious connection to it.

Sidhwa grew up in a Farsi household in Flint, Michigan and decided to become a physician after being inspired by an Israeli doctor he met after college while visiting a hospital in the West Bank, according to the Mount Diablo Peace and Justice Center.

By his own admission, he has been studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since he was 18—well over half of his life. He claims to have read hundreds of books on the subject and volunteered in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza prior to the war.

In a 2007 article for Counterpunch, Dr. Sidhwa wrote that he “volunteered in Hebron, West Bank, at al-Ahli Hospital [in Hebron] and with the Palestinian Medical Relief Society….”

Similarly, in a 2007 entry by Dr. Sidhwa in the FEZANA Journal — published by the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America — he writes that he “spent eight months in Israel and the West Bank, from October 2004 to May 2005.” Even then, Dr. Sidhwa’s disdain for Israel was evident:

“I also saw what this brutalization of a helpless people is doing to Israel. This previously functional, cohesive socialist society in which healthcare, education and other necessities were once guaranteed is now decaying, with a sharp rise in chronic drug abuse, drug trafficking, violent crime, human trafficking, spousal abuse, homelessness, unemployment, prostitution, forced labor and the like. Israel was born through Palestinian misery; if it stays the course, Israeli society will no doubt self-destruct.”

Dr. Sidhwa then proceeds to explain why Zoroastrians like himself should care about the conclifct, despite not having a direct stake in it:

“Zoroastrians have a unique historical link to the Jewish people. Cyrus the Great ended the Babylonian Captivity, repatriated the enslaved Jews to Jerusalem, and subsequently issued what came to be known as the First Charter of Human Rights. Cyrus is the only non-Jew named to the position of messiah in the Tanakh, and Koresh (‘Cyrus’ in Hebrew) is a common family and street name in Israel. We dishonor Cyrus’s legacy by sitting idly by and letting the self-declared ‘Jewish State’ run drunk with power. Furthermore, the United States bears primary responsibility for this human disaster. The US government funds and subsidizes Israel’s military to the tune of four to six billion dollars per year. Without this unprecedented level of funding, Israel would be forced to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip immediately. Every relevant Arab and Palestinian group and government has stated that such a withdrawal would immediately end the armed conflict. American Zoroastrians, then, shoulder a heavy burden. We can continue funding Israel’s liquidation of Palestinian society and Israel’s own self-destruction, or we can carry forth the humane legacy of Cyrus and apply his Charter to all people.”

Most notable, in my opinion, is that Dr. Sidhwa has helped edit or fine-tune at least five books and essays by notorious Hamas-supporting academic Norman Finkelstein, with whom he has appeared at events during the Hamas-Israel War. The works edited by Sidhwa are:

• Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End (2012)

• Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2008)

• What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance, and Courage (2012)

• This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion (2010)

• The Camp David II Negotiations: How Dennis Ross Proved the Palestinians Aborted the Peace Process (2007)

Speaking of Finkelstein, the academic once posted a 2014 email exchange between Dr. Sidhwa and MIT professor Theodore Postol about the Iron Dome—an exchange that Dr. Sidhwa had sent to him. In the email, Dr. Sidhwa expresses frustration over Postol’s claim that Hamas intentionally puts civilians in harm’s way to provoke Israeli strikes and manipulate global opinion. Sidhwa takes offense at the implication that Hamas deliberately uses its own people as human shields. (Which, by the way, is true.)

Most recently, after the far-left Haaretz published a bogus article accusing Israeli soldiers of being ordered to shoot Palestinians gathering near aid sites administered by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Dr. Sidhwa boosted his response as a paid ad on X — meaning Dr. Sidhwa used his own money, or perhaps funds from an undisclosed benefactor, to amplify the anti-Israel propaganda.

These are not the actions of someone without a deep attachment to the conflict.

Dr. Sidhwa’s Hamas Apologia

Dr. Sidhwa has consistently whitewashed, minimized, and downplayed Hamas’ crimes, as well as their use of civilians as human shields. For example, he has compared the Mossad having its headquarters in central Israel to Hamas operating out of densely populated civilian areas.

He has also claimed that “almost nobody who is actually part of Hamas lives in the West Bank” and that the group “barely exists” there. But having read hundreds of books on the subject, and having volunteered in the West Bank and Israel for eight months during the 2000’s, Dr. Sidhwa knows better. Hamas is deeply embedded in the West Bank—they maintain commanders for specific cities and towns, engage in combat with the IDF, and hold marches there on the regular.

Perhaps most striking is Dr. Sidhwa’s repeated assertion that he didn’t see any Hamas operatives in Gaza hospitals or anywhere else. In one BBC interview, he stated: “I didn’t witness it, and neither has literally anyone else who’s ever been to Gaza. Not a single person ever once, because it’s complete nonsense.”

This is an astonishing claim, considering the wealth of evidence showing Hamas terrorists inside Gaza’s hospitals — and the fact that Hamas runs the medical system in the Strip. Former Israeli hostages have attested to Hamas being present in Gaza’s hospitals; foreign volunteer doctors have attested to it; even Palestinians doctors themselves have attested to it. Yet Dr. Sidhwa denies it? How strange. It’s even more strange because in one X post, he ceded the point (and excused the fact) that Hamas took Israeli hostages into hospitals. So, which is it, Feroze?

Even in June 2025, well after mountains of proof has been published showing Hamas presence inside Gaza’s hospitals, Dr. Sidhwa STILL denied — in an interview with Hamas fan Hasan Piker, no less — seeing Hamas “militants” inside any hospital.

After the publication of his NYT op-ed, Dr. Sidhwa admitted that while Hamas does abuse civilians, he was “unaware of Hamas shooting anyone trying to access aid” — despite well-documented evidence to the contrary dating back to December 2023. He also insisted that it is “absolutely false” that Hamas seeks to maximize civilian casualties or uses human shields. This, despite overwhelming allegations to the contrary from the European Union and UN Secretary General (hardly friends of Israel), the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, the Biden White House, and even Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar himself.

Dr. Sidhwa has also excused Hamas’ unwillingness to allow the Red Cross to visit Israeli hostages, writing that “If Israel were to allow the ICRC into its prisons where thousands of Palestinian hostages [i.e. terrorists] are kept then Hamas would likely allow the ICRC access to the 101 Israeli hostages in Gaza.”

When a user on X posted a video of Palestinian children in a UN school calling in Arabic to kill Jews, Dr. Sidhwa responded by saying that “every Palestinian knows the difference between Jews and Israelis, even though they use the terms ‘Yisraeli’ and ‘Yehudi’ [Israeli and Jew, respectively] interchangeably in common speech.”

With opinions like that, it’s no wonder that Dr. Sidhwa was also interviewed by the Iranian government-run Press TV during one of his delegations to Gaza.

When an X user shared a post highlighting genocidal antisemitic statements by Hamas officials — including calls to “bring annihilation to the Jews,” “tear their hearts from their bodies,” “kill them all,” and “attack every Jew on the globe by way of slaughter and killing” — Dr. Sidhwa replied: “You can find the same and even worse from Israeli leaders, up to and including the Prime Minister of Israel.”

Some Israeli officials have indeed said reprehensible things. But none have made statements remotely comparable to those quoted above.

Dr. Sidhwa & European Hospital

In interviews, articles, and on social media, Dr. Sidhwa frequently cites his time volunteering at European Hospital—where, as he’s eager to remind us, he definitely didn’t see any Hamas members. Because, of course, Hamas has never, ever set foot in a hospital. Not once. Not anywhere. Not ever.

His certainty of the matter is interesting, in light of the substantial evidence that Hamas is indeed present in European Hospital.

For example, Dr. Saleh al-Hams, the nursing director of Gaza’s European Hospital — who is also referred to in the media as the facility’s deputy director — has repeatedly signaled strong ties to Hamas. As I previously discovered, in 2017 and 2018, he shared photos of himself wearing Hamas military attire, including a camouflage jacket and a hat bearing the Qassam Brigades logo. In 2020, he posted images of armed Hamas members and a child holding a rifle, captioned with a defiant statement about resistance and future confrontation. Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre, al-Hams celebrated the attack, calling it a “gift” and a moment of “pride and dignity.”

Did Dr. Sidhwa never cross paths with Dr. al-Hams? Or are they in fact acquainted—and Dr. Sidhwa is simply unaware, or unwilling to admit, that the hospital’s number two is Hamas himself?

Moreover, the IDF released footage showing a Hamas-built tunnel directly beneath the European Hospital in Khan Younis—the same tunnel where Hamas leader Muhammad Sinwar was killed in a May 13 strike.

According to the IDF and Shin Bet, troops recently accessed the underground facility, discovering the bodies of several Hamas operatives along with command rooms, weapons, and intelligence materials. The military emphasized that this tunnel is yet another example of Hamas using hospitals for terror activity and as safe havens for senior commanders. The May 13 strike also killed Muhammad Shabana, commander of Hamas’s Rafah Brigade, and Mahdi Quara, commander of the South Khan Younis Battalion.

In the days following the strike, Dr. Sidhwa condemned the IDF’s actions and dismissed the idea that a Hamas tunnel existed beneath the hospital—despite “factional sources” (i.e. Hamas) themselves confirming to Saudi media that a tunnel was indeed there.

And if all that weren’t enough, legendary researcher and Honest Reporting board member Salo Aizenberg has identified multiple Islamic Jihad terrorists who doubled as staff at European Hospital. This includes a nurse/Qassam Brigades terrorist, an administrator/Islamic Jihad group commander, a pediatric daycare unit worker/squad leader in a PIJ rocket unit, and another nurse/intelligence commander.

Dr. Sidhwa & Nasser Hospital

Sidhwa returned to Gaza for a second stint in 2025, volunteering at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis from March 3 to April 1—the same hospital where American Doctor is largely set. On March 23, an Israeli strike hit the hospital room where a patient he’d just operated on was recovering, killing two people. In Sidhwa’s own account on Democracy Now, he acknowledged that one of the two people killed was Ismail Barhoum, the figure the IDF has identified as Hamas’s prime minister in the Gaza Strip. Sidhwa’s response wasn’t to deny it, but to argue it was still illegal. (By any reasonable interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, it was absolutely legal, as damage to the hospital was minimal and only two people died — one of whom was the target.)

Two months later, in a May 23, 2025 interview with Israel’s Channel 13, Sidhwa was asked point-blank whether he’d seen tunnels or ammunition at Gaza’s hospitals. “No. And neither has anybody else,” he said. Later in the same answer, he turned to Nasser on his own: if Hamas really had tunnels under the complex, he asked, why was its prime minister killed inside the hospital instead of hiding in the tunnels underneath? It’s an odd piece of logic. It treats the presence of Hamas’s most senior Gaza-based leader inside the hospital as proof there was nothing to find, rather than as exactly the kind of senior Hamas presence Israel has alleged all along.

Nasser’s record, in fact, is among the most extensively documented cases of terrorist exploitation of any hospital in the war. Multiple freed Israeli hostages, including Sharon Aloni Cunio, have said they were held captive inside the complex. Hamas’s own Interior Ministry ran policing operations out of the hospital, at one point ordering a Gaza resident to appear for interrogation at a location stamped “Ministry of Interior, West Khan Younis Police, Investigations Dept., Nasser Hospital.”

And in April 2025, Islamic Jihad’s armed wing threatened Nasser’s own head of nursing after he tried to keep the group’s gunmen out of the wards, warning him in a note that he’d “crossed the line.”

The overlap between medical staff and terrorist operatives goes well beyond isolated threats. Islamic Jihad’s own obituaries have named operatives such as Salem Juma Ishaq Sharab as simultaneously serving as a Nasser Hospital nurse, treasurer of the Palestinian Nursing Association, and a commander in the group’s Military Ambulance Unit for the Khan Younis Brigade.

Aizenberg found that Islamic Jihad has confirmed several additional operatives held positions as medical staff at the facility.

Even Doctors Without Borders—hardly a friendly source for Israel’s version of events—announced in February 2026 that it was suspending non-critical operations at Nasser after its own staff and patients witnessed “armed men, some masked,” moving through the compound. As recently as last month, the IDF said it killed senior Islamic Jihad commander Zaki Abu Mustafa while he was using the hospital to train new operatives.

None of this squares with Sidhwa’s insistence that he and everyone else who worked in Gaza’s hospitals saw nothing.

Creating an Artificial Hamas Spokesman

The most revealing part of Dr. Sidhwa’s emergence as the medical field’s go-to Hamas apologist is that it appears to be part of a calculated media campaign to launder him into the mainstream.

Consider this: While most readers of the New York Times op-ed that launched his public profile were rightly outraged at its dishonesty, the article may not have been the end goal. It may have simply been a launchpad.

Since the op-ed’s publication, Dr. Sidhwa—once an unknown figure operating quietly in anti-Israel circles behind the scenes—has become a prolific commentator. The timing isn’t incidental. His personal website, which includes a press kit and sections highlighting his advocacy work, was registered and launched on October 9, 2024—the very day the op-ed was published.

This isn’t the behavior of a “neutral” observer. It’s the calculated move of someone who’s spent years preparing to become a full-time propagandist—driven by deep ideological and religious conviction, and armed with a clear strategy.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is not impartial. He is not a bystander. He is a deeply committed, ideologically motivated actor with a long track record of minimizing Hamas’ atrocities, distorting facts, and weaponizing his medical credentials to smuggle disinformation into the public square.

And the media, willingly or not, has played along.

And now the film industry has joined them. When American Doctor reaches theaters this month, it will give Sidhwa his largest audience yet—an acclaimed, award-winning documentary that presents him to the public exactly as he has always wished to be seen — the reluctant American healer, blameless and above the fray.

But audiences heading to theaters deserve to know who’s really doing the talking.

For two decades, Trita Parsi has been Washington’s go-to explainer for all things Iran. The “neutral” scholar. The voice of the Iranian American community. The reasonable man who only ever wanted diplomacy. He co-founded the Quincy Institute, ran the National Iranian American Council before that, and turns up in the New York Times, on the BBC, on MSNBC, and on Steve Bannon’s War Room, always saying a version of the same thing.

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This week Jay Solomon at The Free Press reported that the State Department has opened an investigation into him and may try to revoke his green card and deport him. Cue the frame you already know. “A war critic, targeted.” “A dissenter, punished for his views.”

Trita Parsi runs the show at the Quincy Institute. But before that, he built and ran the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), and for fifteen years he has been one of the most quoted Iran analysts in Washington. The problem is that Parsi told us what he really was a long time ago.

He wrote it down. And a federal judge made him hand the paper over.

How the Documents Got Out

When NIAC sued the blogger Hassan Daioleslam for defamation in 2008, the discovery process forced thousands of internal NIAC records into the open. NIAC stonewalled and got caught. In 2012 Judge John Bates, a Bush appointee, dismissed the suit, and the courts later sanctioned NIAC and Parsi more than 183,000 dollars for discovery abuses. The D.C. Circuit affirmed the bulk of that award in 2015, while sending two smaller pieces back for reconsideration.

Bates was careful. He wrote that nothing in his opinion should be read as a finding that Daioleslam’s articles were true. Parsi lost on the narrow ground that he could not prove actual malice, the high bar a public figure has to clear. But Bates also wrote something the people who quote Parsi as a neutral source never mention. He wrote that Parsi’s occasional balanced statements were “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime.” A moderately intelligent agent for Tehran, the judge added, would not want to look unremittingly pro regime.

The Lobby He Named Himself

Start with the résumés, because Parsi wrote those.

In 1997 Parsi founded a group called Iranians for International Cooperation (IIC), and it did not hide what it was. The public FAQ asked whether IIC was a political party or a lobby and answered plainly. The answer was a resounding hell yes. A whole section was headed around whether an Iranian lobby was needed, and the answer it gave itself was of course it is. This was not a line buried in one document. It was the public face of the group, and the page stayed up with the same language, captured over and over between 1999 and 2005. The stated mission was “to safeguard Iran’s and Iranian’s interests,” topped by lifting US sanctions.

IIC and NIAC share some noticeable overlap in personnel. By 2000, the IIC board listed Parsi as executive director, Babak Talebi as president, and Alex Patico as an advisor. Two years later, all three were tied to the launch of NIAC. Both Talebi and Patico are listed as co-founders with Parsi. The new group (appeared to be) the old group with a cleaner name.

In a memo Parsi sent from his official Bob Ney congressional email account to Roy Coffee and Ney's former chief of staff David DiStefano, first reported by Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy, Parsi laid out plans for a new lobbying outfit in “strategic partnership“ with NIAC. NIAC would handle community education and the grassroots; the new group would “focus exclusively on lobbying activities on the Hill.”

It would model itself on AIPAC, Parsi explained. And it would have a proposed executive director already lined up, named in the memo: Trita Parsi. The title of the document was “Towards the creation of an Iranian-American lobby.” Parsi told Rogin the discussions went nowhere.

In other words, Parsi named himself executive director of an Iran lobby in writing.

The Patron Who Went to Prison

Parsi’s entry point to Washington was a congressman named Bob Ney. He first met Ney in 1991 as a high school exchange student in Ohio, when Ney was a state senator who had taught English in Iran and spoke Farsi. Ney reportedly took Parsi in after a falling out with his host family.

Ney is worth remembering for what he became. In 2007, he was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Part of what he admitted to was taking trips and gambling chips from Fouad al-Zayat, a Syrian born aviation businessman who wanted Ney’s help getting around a US law barring the export of American aircraft parts. That is the man who walked Parsi onto Capitol Hill.

Money From Tehran

Parsi’s longtime collaborator was Siamak Namazi, who ran Atieh Bahar Consulting as its Managing Director — the consulting firm in Tehran that walked foreign oil majors into the Iranian market. Court-produced discovery documents include an Atieh Bahar political newsletter1 on US-Iran relations, described on its masthead as prepared by the firm’s “affiliate analyst in Washington, DC,” which NIAC produced under court order. They show Atieh Bahar’s Bijan Khajehpour writing to Parsi2 to say he wanted to transfer funds to his account and needed his bank details. And they show Namazi writing from Tehran3 to his Atieh Bahar assistant, instructing her to call a hotel in Jordan, and arrange a nice room with an Xbox or Playstation in it.

In December 2002, Parsi emailed4 the lobbyist Roy Coffee. He handed over the full contact details for Mohammad Javad Zarif, then Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, and in the same message asked Coffee to find out who inside the Bush administration had drafted a statement on Iran. Coffee’s reply offered to go further: if Parsi had anything he wanted relayed to the statement writers for future use, Coffee would deliver it himself. By 2007 Parsi was sending Namazi written reports5 on the US Congress and AIPAC, on request, to Tehran. Namazi was sending talking points6 back the other way.

The 1999 paper Parsi and Namazi coauthored7 and presented at a conference in Cyprus is the thesis statement for all of it. It argues for building an Iranian American lobby modeled openly on AIPAC. The paper takes care to say this lobby would be different from one purely pursuing the Islamic Republic’s interests. Then it footnotes itself with interviews and correspondence Namazi conducted with the former head of Iran’s interest section in Washington, a director general at the Ministry of Culture, and an official at the Foreign Ministry.

Why This Matters Now

The reporting was done years ago, and done well. Eli Lake laid out the lobby story in the Washington Times in 2009. Josh Rogin covered it at Foreign Policy the same day. Tablet went back to it in 2017.

The work held up. What did not hold was everything after it. The rest of the establishment press decided Parsi was a respectable analyst, and the documents stopped getting read.

Even Hooshang Amirahmadi, the man who first hired Parsi in Washington and gave him his US visa, told Tablet that he introduced Parsi to Zarif and that “Zarif wanted this organization and he developed it.” Parsi has always denied that NIAC works for the regime.

Now that the State Department is reportedly looking into Parsi, the forthcoming media coverage will assuredly and uniformly portray him as it always has: A scholar. A war critic. A man targeted for his views.

But State isn’t looking into him for his views — but for his résumé. And the full record is not a leaked cache or a confidential source. It is documents a federal court already made public, written by Parsi, in his own hand. They have been sitting there the whole time. Washington just stopped following the trail.

This article was produced with the help of AI.

1

Atieh Bahar political newsletter on US-Iran relations

Parsi Atieh Bahar

148KB ∙ PDF file

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2

Bijan Khajehpour telling Parsi he wanted to transfer funds to his account

Parsi Bijan

14KB ∙ PDF file

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3

Namazi telling his Atieh Bahar assistant to call a hotel in Jordan for Parsi

Parsi Hotel

24KB ∙ PDF file

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4

Parsi email to Roy Coffee

Parsi Coffee Email

26KB ∙ PDF file

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5

Parsi’s reports sent to Namazi

Parsi Lobby Groups

81.1KB ∙ PDF file

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6

Namazi’s talking points to Parsi

Parsi Talking Points

107KB ∙ PDF file

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7

Parsi and Namazi 1999 paper

Parsi Cyprus Paper 1999

51.7KB ∙ PDF file

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Clash Report presents itself as a neutral conflict news aggregator, but it is the English-language division of a Turkish media company with deep ties to the Erdoğan family and Turkish state agencies. The company behind it, Monolog Medya, was a contractor for two branches of the Erdoğan political family — his personal charitable foundation and the flagship festival of his son-in-law Selçuk Bayraktar, Turkey’s drone billionaire. Monolog Medya’s director is a veteran of TRT, Turkey’s state broadcaster.

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Clash Report’s editors are TRT alumni, its only advertiser is a Turkish state defense contractor, and its podcast host promotes Muslim Brotherhood leaders. When Western politicians and journalists share Clash Report, they are amplifying an Erdoğan-adjacent influence operation dressed up as breaking news. To be more specific:

• Clash Report is the name of a prominent English-language news aggregator X account. The account frequently goes viral, with its content shared by U.S. senators, congressmen, prominent influencers, podcasters, and tech figures. Interspersed among its news posts, however, are numerous instances of conspiratorial, antisemitic, and anti-American content.

• A Turkish company called Monolog Medya Bilişim Eğitim Reklam ve Organizasyon Ltd. Şti. runs a Turkish-language news platform called GDH (”Gündeme Dair Haberler” — “News About the Agenda”). Clash Report is GDH’s English-language division. The three are the same operation: one company, one editorial team, two brands in two languages.

• Monolog Medya’s director and owner, Cüneyt Polat, is a former Digital Media Director at Turkey’s state broadcaster TRT. His company lists a client called TÜRGEV — the personal charitable foundation of the Erdoğan family, marking one of two separate Erdoğan family connections — the second, the Bayraktar contracting relationship, is described below.

• Monolog Medya operated backend servers for Teknofest — Turkey’s state-backed technology festival run by Selçuk Bayraktar’s T3 Foundation. Selçuk Bayraktar is Erdoğan’s son-in-law and owner of Baykar, Turkey’s flagship drone manufacturer.

• Clash Report’s Chief Editor is Kamer Kurunç. Among its staff is Mehmet A. Kancı, a TRT Haber Special Reports Coordinator and writer for Anadolu Ajansı (another state-run outlet).

• The Clash Report X account sat dormant for five years, then activated on February 28, 2020 — the night Turkey launched Operation Spring Shield in Syria. By the next day it had 49,200 followers.

Why Clash Report Matters

Spend any time on X following politics and military conflicts, and you’ve undoubtedly encountered Clash Report. Drone footage, conflict maps, breaking strike updates, political developments in America and Europe, all in English, all timestamped within minutes of events. Major Western reporters quote it. Wire services reference it. Politicans retweet it. Even national governments engage with it. The brand presents itself, in its own words, as your source for unbiased, data-driven news and analysis on global conflicts.

Anyone familiar with influence operations will recognize Clash Report for what it really is. After some old-fashioned sleuthing, I’ve identified the company behind it, the people running it, and their ties to the Turkish state media apparatus — including one operator who pushes a Muslim Brotherhood agenda — even as the brand takes deliberate steps to obscure its Turkish origins.

The Company Behind Clash Report

Let’s start with the most important find — the one that closes the loop on who actually owns this operation.

Apple’s App Store maintains a public database of every app developer. When you look up Clash Report’s iOS app by its App Store ID (6748907974), Apple’s own system returns a single legal developer name: MONOLOG MEDYA BİLİŞİM EĞİTİM REKLAM VE ORGANİZASYON LİMİTED ŞİRKETİ — Monolog Media Informatics Education Advertising and Organization Ltd. This is not inferred or guessed. It is a machine-returned field from Apple’s own database.

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The same developer record lists not one app, not two, but three: Clash Report, Clash Report Map, and GDH: Haberin Dijital Medyası (”GDH: The Digital Media of the News”). Apple’s metadata also includes a “seller URL” field for the developer account, and that field does not point to clashreport.com. It points to a different website entirely: gdh.digital.

GDH is short for “Gündeme Dair Haberler” — Turkish for “News About the Agenda.” It is a Turkish-language news platform that launched in late 2021. Clash Report is its English-language division. Monolog Medya is the company that runs both. This is the chain: Monolog owns GDH; GDH runs Clash Report. One Turkish limited liability company, two public-facing brands, one editorial operation.

The proof does not stop at Apple’s database. It is sitting in the operation’s own infrastructure.

Examination of GDH’s domain name records — the public technical records that describe how a website is hosted — reveals an internal subdomain called clashreport.gdh.digital. In other words, the operators of GDH set up a server inside their own GDH domain, named it after Clash Report, and run Clash Report’s content through it. Clash Report exists, technically, as a sub-component of gdh.digital. Companies do not configure their infrastructure this way unless one is a part of the other.

The shared technical fingerprints continue:

• Both domains use the same Cloudflare nameservers (milan and wanda.ns.cloudflare.com), meaning they are managed under one Cloudflare account.

• Both websites load images from the same content delivery network bucket, named image-gdh.b-cdn.net. Clash Report’s photos are served from a CDN bucket with “GDH” in its name.

• Historical hosting records show both domains running on the same Istanbul-based hosting provider, TTEN Teknoloji A.Ş., on consecutive IP addresses. Earlier records place Clash Report on Çizgi Telekomünikasyon, also in Istanbul. The operation is hosted out of Istanbul.

There is also direct human evidence that GDH and Clash Report share staff, not just servers. Several editorial team members have user accounts registered on both domains’ content management systems. Email addresses matching Mehmet A. Kancı’s name — mehmet.kanci@clashreport.com and mehmet.kanci@gdh.digital — appear in the platform’s own source code, indicating registered user accounts within both systems. Gayesude Kayışlı, another editorial staffer, similarly appears in both systems. These are the same people, working for the same operation, under two different brand names.

Monolog Medya is a registered Turkish limited liability company with a website at monolog.com.tr and a business directory listing at Cumhuriyet Mah. Kıbrıs Cad. Sakız Sok. 17 D:14, Bahçelievler, İstanbul. It presents itself as a generic digital media and advertising agency. It is, in fact, the company that has been running one of the most widely-cited conflict news accounts on the internet.

Clash Report’s own contact page lists its address at Çobançeşme Mh. Sanayi Cad. No: 44 D-D:21, Bahçelievler, İstanbul. The phone number listed beside the address is +90 (000) 000 00 00 — a placeholder that was never filled in.

Monolog Medya’s registered business address is on a different street in the same Bahçelievler district. In other words, the company has at least two Istanbul addresses associated with its operations.

The Corporate “Shell”

As of April 2026, Monolog Medya’s public-facing business appears dormant. The company’s website at monolog.com.tr serves static content last updated around 2020-2021. The blog contains zero posts — the RSS feed is completely empty. All social media accounts (@monologmedya on X, Facebook, Instagram) have been inactive for six or more years. The company’s listed contact emails — info@monolog.com.tr and contact@monolog.com.tr — return SMTP “550 No Such User” errors, indicating no active mailboxes exist.

Yet the domain is renewed through November 2026, and the corporate entity remains the registered publisher of Clash Report’s iOS app in Apple’s records. This is not a dissolved company — it is a maintained legal shell. The actual operational work simply happens under the GDH brand. Monolog Medya serves as the corporate vehicle for contracts, app store registrations, and legal filings, while GDH and Clash Report handle public-facing operations.

Attempts to reach Monolog Medya for comment via all listed channels were unsuccessful.

The Man Running Monolog: Cüneyt Polat

Monolog Medya did not spring from nowhere. It has an owner, a director, and a face — and that face has a documented history inside Turkey’s government media apparatus that goes well beyond what the Clash Report brand would ever want its Western audience to know.

Turkish corporate registry filings identify Cüneyt Polat as Monolog Medya’s co-founder, primary shareholder, and current sole director, a position he has held on a continuous or near-continuous basis since the company’s founding in November 2014. He is the controlling figure behind the company that runs Clash Report. Monolog Medya’s registration number with the government is 944999. Polat is also publicly identified as the owner of GDH.

I was unable to identify Monolog Medya’s board of directors. However, a Turkish citizen with access to this portal theoretically could do so.

Polat served as TRT Haber Digital Media Director for twelve months, during which he directed the development of new broadcast models for TRT’s digital news platforms. TRT is directly controlled by the Turkish government and has been documented as a vehicle for Turkish state messaging.

Polat attended and reported from a private session hosted by the head of Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB), a Turkish government agency under direct presidential authority responsible for diaspora relations and soft-power projection abroad. These sessions are not open to the general public. Polat was in the room.

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In December 2025, following the arrest of Habertürk’s editor-in-chief, Polat was publicly reported as the likely incoming editor-in-chief of Habertürk — one of Turkey’s largest cable news networks. Just three months prior, the network was seized by the Turkish government. That such a position was publicly associated with his name is itself significant: it means he is considered sufficiently reliable by the media ownership circles aligned with the government to be handed editorial control of a major national outlet.

To summarize in the meantime: The man behind Monolog Medya, the company that owns Clash Report, is a state media veteran, a trusted figure in the government media ecosystem, and — as you will see detailed below — his company is a contractor for the Erdoğan family’s own foundations.

Monolog Medya’s Ties to the Erdoğan Family

The relationship between Monolog Medya and the Erdoğan political family is not a single data point. It runs through two separate institutions, one pre-dating the other by years. Together they describe a company that is not merely adjacent to the Turkish government — it is stitched into the family’s own institutional fabric.

Connection One: TÜRGEV — The Erdoğan Family Foundation

Monolog Medya’s own public references page — a company’s curated list of clients it chooses to advertise — lists only two outside clients in its entire history. One is something called Kolejiniseç. The other is TÜRGEV.

TÜRGEV is not a generic charity. It was founded by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself during his tenure as Istanbul’s mayor in the 1990s, and has been run in close association with his family ever since. Erdoğan’s daughter, Esra Albayrak, sits on its board of directors. His son, Bilal Erdoğan, is a member of the Foundation Assembly. The foundation operates dormitories, education programs, and youth centers across Turkey, and has been awarded government land and tax exemptions through decisions that critics argue required direct Erdoğan family intervention.

TÜRGEV is also not controversy-free. It was named in the December 17, 2013 corruption indictment — Turkey’s largest graft investigation — which alleged that a private courier for an Iranian-Turkish gold trader later sanctioned by the United States, entered the TÜRGEV building carrying bags of cash. The investigation was shut down before charges could be filed; critics allege Erdoğan’s government intervened to kill it.

Monolog Medya lists TÜRGEV as one of its only two clients on its own public references page. For a small Istanbul digital agency, building the web presence of the Erdoğan family’s personal charitable foundation is not a routine commercial transaction. It is an act of institutional proximity. It means the people at Monolog were trusted with the digital face of Erdoğan’s own house.

Connection Two: Bayraktar and Teknofest

The second Erdoğan family connection runs through a different branch of the family, and directly into Turkey’s defense-industrial complex.

Publicly accessible internet certificate records show that Monolog Medya operated a backend server called teknofest-api.monolog.com.tr from February 2022 through November 2024. The certificates were renewed every 90 days, eleven times in a row, over 33 consecutive months. That is sustained, professional infrastructure work — not a one-off project.

Teknofest is Turkey’s largest technology festival, organized by the T3 Foundation (Türkiye Technology Team Foundation) and the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Industry and Technology.

The T3 Foundation’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees is Selçuk Bayraktar, who just so happens to also be Erdoğan’s son-in-law, and a billionaire drone manufacturer.

Far from just a simple tech fair, Teknofest operates under direct presidential patronage and is one of the flagship projects of Turkey’s national defense industry drive. And Monolog Medya — the company that operates GDH and Clash Report — was a backend contractor for it for nearly three years.

To be clear about what this means in full: Monolog Medya has documented client relationships with the personal foundation of the Erdoğan family (TÜRGEV, through his daughter Esra) and with the flagship technology festival of Erdoğan’s son-in-law (Teknofest, through Selçuk Bayraktar). These are not the same institution. They are two separate nodes of the Erdoğan political family. The company behind Clash Report is connected to both.

Clash Report’s Advertising Fingerprint

Clash Report’s homepage features a prominent banner ad for Aselsan, the Turkish state defense electronics giant. That is the only display advertiser visible on the site.

Aselsan is 74.20% owned by the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation, with the rest trading on the Istanbul stock exchange. It was founded in 1975 as a state vehicle for Turkish military electronics. Since 2017, the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation’s board has been chaired by the President of Turkey.

The People Behind the Clash Report Brand

Up until late April 2026, Clash Report did not publicly present any staff, editor-in-chief, founder, managing director, or publisher. Even now, the site has no masthead of any kind. But once I exposed how Clash Report likely used bot swarms to amass its large following on X, its editor revealed himself.

Kamer Kurunç — Chief Editor

Clash Report’s own YouTube channel names Kamer Kurunç by title. A video published on April 28, 2026 carries this description: “Clash Point host Isaac Eshetu and Chief Editor Kamer Kurunc sit down with Timothy Ash.”

Kurunç operates on X under the handle @kamerknc with the display name “Turkish Market.” His profile describes a focus on “Dış Haber / OSINT / U.S. / MENA / Turkey / National Security / Crowdsourcing.” He has 96,000+ followers, nearly 80,000 tweets, and links to a Telegram channel at t.me/realTurkishMarket.

Mehmet A. Kancı — State Media Columnist

Mehmet A. Kancı is part of the editorial staff of Clash Report. His bio, published on TRT Haber’s own author page, explains that he began at a private broadcaster in 1994, moved to TRT — the Turkish state broadcaster with questionable ties — and writes foreign-policy analyses for Anadolu Ajansı, another Turkish state news agency. Both are direct instruments of the Erdoğan government’s communications infrastructure. His verified title at TRT is Special Reports Coordinator, also referred to as Main News Director in TRT's own published materials. As of April 2026, Kancı still works as an editor for TRT.

Crucially, Kancı is not just an outside contributor publishing op-eds. Email addresses matching Kancı’s name — mehmet.kanci@clashreport.com and mehmet.kanci@gdh.digital — appear in the platform’s own source code, indicating registered user accounts within both content management systems. By all appearances, Kancı appears to be simultaneously working for Clash Report and Turkish state media.

It’s in Kancı’s personal writing that his true feelings are shared. He’s written that Israel has a “policy of killing children,” that U.S. President Donald Trump has “lost touch with reality,” that “Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby” have “blackmailed” Trump, that “Jewish lobbies that have bought 90% of members across both chambers of Congress,” and other similarly antisemitic, anti-American, conspiratorial nonsense.

Levent Kemal — Former Anadolu Agency Syria Correspondent

Levent Kemal is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul who confirmed his own Clash Report affiliation in a February 2026 tweet: “For the curious, I’m attaching below the work I did at Clash Report almost a year ago.” His Middle East Eye author bio confirms he was Syria correspondent for Anadolu — the same Turkish state news agency where Kancı publishes.

Isaac Eshetu — Clash Point Host, Islamist Content Network

Isaac Eshetu — full name Isaac Eshetu Aragaw — is the on-camera host of Clash Report’s video podcast, Clash Point. His LinkedIn identifies him as an Ethiopian journalist based in Istanbul, educated at Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University — a Turkish state-foundation university run under the Republic of Turkey’s Directorate General of Foundations.

On his personal X account @isaacEthio, Eshetu posts Islamic scholars and commentators affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood alongside the hashtag #UmmahQuotes. Two of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders he has repeatedly chosen to promote are:

• Dr. Tariq al-Suwaidan, whom Eshetu promoted under the headline “We Will Crush Your Business with Boycott If You Support Apartheid Israel,” is an organizational Brotherhood leader, not simply a sympathizer. He publicly identified himself as “one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood” during a lecture in Yemen. Kuwait revoked his citizenship by royal decree in December 2025. In a 2014 sermon directed at Hamas, he urged Palestinian mothers to raise their children “on the hatred of the sons of Zion.” Belgium banned him from entry over antisemitic statements.

• Dr. Azzam Tamimi, whom Eshetu promoted under the headline “America is in Decline! Tyranny Can’t Last Forever!”, is a confirmed Brotherhood figure in Britain. He was a prominent official in the Muslim Association of Britain and co-founded the British Muslim Initiative, both of which are Brotherhood-affiliated organizations. In September 2014 the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s own website described him as “a leading member of the Brotherhood in Britain.” He was previously the official spokesperson for the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood. In a 2004 BBC interview, he described becoming a suicide bomber against Israel as “a noble cause... the straight way to pleasing my God.”

These are two of the most prominent confirmed Brotherhood figures in the English-speaking world, and Clash Report’s podcast host is actively and repeatedly amplifying both under a branded content project on his personal account.

There is a further biographical thread worth noting, though it is not yet fully confirmed. CPJ records from 2012–2013 document an Isaac Eshetu who was a copy editor at Ye Muslimoch Guday (”Muslim Affairs”), an Ethiopian Islamic publication whose editors were jailed on counter-terrorism charges. According to ARTICLE 19’s UN submission, “Akemel Negash and Isaac Eshetu, both editors of Muslim Affairs, fled into exile on 31 July 2012.”

The Launch-Day Tweet

The @clashreport handle was registered on X on May 12, 2015. It sat dormant for nearly five years. Its first tweet posted on February 28, 2020.

The day before, Syrian regime airstrikes had hit a Turkish position in Balyun, southern Idlib, killing 33 Turkish soldiers — directly triggering Operation Spring Shield. By the time Clash Report posted its first tweet, Turkish Bayraktar drones were already airborne over Idlib, destroying Syrian armor on a scale the world had never seen from a Turkish platform.

By the following day, as I already exposed earlier, the Clash Report profile amassed 49,200 followers. An account that had never posted a single tweet in nearly five years had the follower count of a mid-tier media brand. No organic growth mechanism explains that number.

You do not register a Twitter handle in 2015, sit on it for half a decade, and then activate it the night your country launches its largest open military operation in a generation, by accident.

Summing All This Up

Clash Report is the English-language division of a Turkish media company called Monolog Medya, whose director is a veteran of Turkish state media and whose client list includes two separate institutions tied to the Erdoğan political family. Its editors and staff are alumni of Turkish state news outlets, its only advertiser is a Turkish state defense contractor, and its podcast host promotes confirmed Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

When American journalists, politicians, or analysts cite Clash Report as a news source, this is what they are citing. Not an OSINT collective. Not citizen journalism. The English-language division of a Turkish-language news brand, run by a company whose owner is a veteran of Turkish state media, whose client roster includes the personal foundation of the Erdoğan family and the flagship festival of Erdoğan’s son-in-law, edited by people trained in Turkish state media, and hosted by someone who promotes confirmed Muslim Brotherhood leaders on his personal feed.

The operators chose, very deliberately, not to put their names on the door.

So I did it for them.

Eitan’s notes:

The following was created using a combination of open-source tools, AI tools, and my own research. Analytical support provided by ThirdLantern (CYBINT/WEBINT)

I asked Monolog Medya, GDH, Isaac Eshetu, Clash Report, and Mehmet Kancı for comment.

None answered.

With the help of my handy dandy Claude AI, I analyzed 48 episodes and 12,614 transcript chunks from Tucker Carlson’s show that aired between January 1st – April 16th, 2026. Across the full period, Israel-related content appeared in 13.7% of all spoken dialogue, showing up in 41 of 48 episodes (85%). Since the start of Operation Epic Fury until today, that figure climbs to 17.0%, appearing in 21 of 22 episodes (95%). Below is an analysis of how that stacks up against other topics.

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Full Analysis Period

Israel gets 3.8x more airtime than Trump on Tucker’s show and more than the next six topics combined. This is not a show about America. It’s not a show about the economy, or China, or immigration. Those are filler between the Israel segments.

Since Operation Epic Fury

In the February 28 – April 16 window, two new sub-themes take center stage: Iran (439 chunks, 9.4%) — covered almost entirely as an extension of the Israel story — and Religion/Christianity (416 chunks, 8.9%). The religion spike is not coincidental. Tucker’s central thesis in this period is what he calls “Israelism” — his framing of evangelical Christian support for Israel as America’s de facto state religion.

Combined, Israel and Iran equaled 1,231 chunks, or 26.4% of all spoken words in that window. More than every other topic combined.

What Tucker Actually Says

Tucker’s framing is consistent and worth documenting. His recurring language:

• “Israelism” — his coined term for what he calls the de facto civic religion of the U.S. government: “The religion is Israelism — it’s the support of Israel”

• “The chief foreign policy of the United States” — how he describes defending Israel

• “On behalf of Israel / at the instigation of Israel” — his framing of the Iran war

• “The deal killer” — Israel as the single dividing line in MAGA politics

• “Genocidal” — applied to the Netanyahu government’s actions

• “Israel’s lobby” — AIPAC as a congressional pressure mechanism

He also repeatedly portrays Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, and Pope Leo as Trump targets specifically because of their insufficient support for Israel — arguing their only shared trait is skepticism of the Netanyahu government.

The trajectory is unmistakable. Tucker’s show in 2026 is not a political commentary program that occasionally covers foreign policy. It is, by the numbers, a show about Israel program that occasionally covers other things.

When I published my original piece on Drop Site News in January 2025, I noted that the outlet was seeking its own 501(c)(3) status while employing contributors with apparent documented ties to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Since then, nothing has changed — except that Drop Site has added another name to its roster that makes the pattern even harder to excuse.

That name is Abdel Qader Sabbah. And the twist is that the Soros-funded Drop Site didn’t stumble onto him before anyone knew who he was. They picked him up after CNN already dropped him.

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Abdel Qader Sabbah

In July 2024, HonestReporting published an investigation into Sabbah’s social media history that was damning enough to prompt CNN to announce it would no longer use his material. Drop Site’s response, apparently, was to make him one of their main reporters.

The HonestReporting investigation found that Sabbah had photographed himself alongside US Treasury-sanctioned Hamas leader Mahmoud A-Zahar, captioning the image with a reference to A-Zahar as “commander.” He wore the uniform of the General Training Directorate — a Hamas-run body — and produced promotional video content for it.

In 2014, as discovered by Honest Reporting, he praised as a “hero” Hamas’ suicide bomber Izz A-Din Al-Masri, who had blown himself up in a Jerusalem restaurant in 2001, killing 16 people, including children. Sabbah’s praise came as Israel returned the terrorist’s body to the Palestinian Authority 13 years later.

He also shared a Qassam Brigades propaganda video with green and black heart emojis months before October 7th, and circulated Hamas media censorship guidelines during the 2021 conflict — including instructions not to film rocket launch sites.

CNN’s response, after HonestReporting published its findings, was to acknowledge it had been unaware of Sabbah’s posts, call them “highly offensive,” and cut ties with him. Drop Site apparently reached the opposite conclusion. As of April 2026, Sabbah continues writing for the outlet.

His sympathies haven’t changed either. On December 29, 2025, when Hamas announced the death of its spokesman Abu Obeida, Sabbah posted a tribute — an image of a flag-draped coffin accompanied by the Arabic phrase “إلى رحمة الله ورضوانه” (”To the mercy and pleasure of God”) — a traditional Islamic expression used to honor the deceased, deployed here for a man designated as a terrorist by the United States.

CNN fired him. Drop Site made him one of their main reporters. Then again, this is the same outlet whose co-founder Ryan Grim can look at images of an Al Jazeera journalist training with RPGs in an actual Hamas uniform and wave it off without a second thought.

Now, for those of you in need of a refresher, here’s the rest of the Drop Site gang’s reporters who are either tied to terrorist organizations or who love themselves some terrorism, as I previously exposed:

Hossam Shabat

Drop Site ran articles by the now-deceased Hossam Shabat, confirmed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to be a Hamas sniper.

Seeing as the IDF has already confirmed Hossam’s Hamas membership, I will not break down my own findings. However, some of Hossam’s glorification of terror can be found on this thread I previously published.

Mujahed al-Saadi

Another Drop Site contributor, Mujahed also writes for Palestine Today TV, which belongs to the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization (as confirmed by the State Department as well).

You can see my full breakdown of Mujahed’s apparently close relationship with Islamic Jihad officials, including the infamous (now deceased) leader Khader Adnan, in this thread I published several months back.

AbuBaker Abed

Despite his baby-face exterior, Abed has expressed support for terrorism, including the October 7^th massacre, expressed antisemitic sentiments, and called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

• On X, Abed has posted antisemitic content such as “In Your hands, O Lord, are all matters. O God, bestow Your curse upon the Jews. O God, crush them, burn them, and shake the earth beneath them. O Lord, O Lord, O Lord.”

• On the morning of October 7^th, Abed posted a video of Hamas terrorists – whom he refers to as “freedom fighters” – invading Israel and wrote “glad tidings are spread around Gaza” (archived link here).

• During Operation Epic Fury, he encouraged his followers to violence against Irish pro-Israel activist Rachel Moiselle.

Ahlam Al Nafed al Talouli

Ahlam Al Nafed al Talouli, whom Drop Site acknowledges “was a trusted source, providing detailed reporting, video, and information to Drop Site News and others” before she was killed in January 2025.

• On the morning of October 7^th, Ahlam posted a video of Hamas terrorists invading Israel and wrote “Deployment of Al-Qassam members inside the occupation’s settlements. May God protect them, and may our Lord be with them, O Lord.”

• Ahlam also posted on October 7^th that the scenes from the attack are “something we never imagined even in our best dreams.”

• Other posts in support of October 7^th can be found here and here.

• Additional examples of Ahlam’s support for terrorism and violence can be found here.

While the First Amendment is sacred and nonnegotiable, it does not grant outlets the right to employ individuals with ties to terrorism. Similarly, while people are free to express abhorrent ideas—including pro-terror views—this should not be subsidized by American taxpayers.

For these reasons, the U.S. government should deny Drop Site’s application for 501(c)(3) status and revoke its current fiscal sponsorship through the Social Security Works Education Fund.

Beyond that, Congress and the Department of Justice should open a formal investigation into the outlet’s relationships with US-designated terrorist organizations. An outlet that repeatedly and knowingly platforms individuals tied to Hamas and Islamic Jihad — even after those individuals have been rejected by mainstream outlets on exactly those grounds — warrants scrutiny that goes well beyond a denied tax exemption.

Over the course of Operation Epic Fury, Alexander Dugin — the infamous Russian philosopher widely regarded as the intellectual godfather of Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical worldview — published roughly 60 posts mentioning Tucker Carlson. That’s 1.5 per day, every day from February 28 to April 8, making Carlson one of the most referenced figures in his entire feed.

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On March 4, in a burst of posts following the Iran strikes, Dugin published what reads as a political coronation: “Tucker Carlson is absolutely great. Greatest... He is the MAGA. Trump is neocon nothing else. He is over.” And then: “Your Conservative Revolution was hijacked by pedophiles. Rescue it.”

By mid-March: “Tucker Carlson is now so far most important essential political figure in the U.S. Everybody is measured by the agree or disagree with him.”

When the ceasefire came: “Tucker Carlson has won just now the war for the truth and dignity. Absolute winner.”

Then on April 8, Dugin mapped the entire MAGA split onto the German Conservative Revolution of the 1920s: “Trump/Netanyahu/Zionists = Hitler. Tucker Carlson/Candace/Alex Jones = Conservative Revolution.” His framing: Trump hijacked a genuine movement, just as Hitler hijacked the real German conservatives. Tucker is the authentic heir.

The German Conservative Revolutionaries he invokes — Müller van den Bruck, Jünger, Evola — made the philosophical groundwork for what came next, and were then either co-opted or destroyed by it. Whether or not the analogy holds, the embrace is unambiguous.

The Broader Picture

The Tucker fixation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Over the same 40 days, Dugin generated 2,066 retweets and quote tweets (48 per day). I analyzed these using AI tools. The network he was amplifying tells you exactly who he is trying to stitch together. His top accounts:

• Disinformation peddler Mario Nawfal (87 retweets)

• Constantin von Hoffmeister of Arktos (63)

• Belgian New Right theorist Robert Steuckers (36)

• Moscow-based (?) Jackson Hinkle (25)

• MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom (21)

• Certifiable Looney Tune Alex Jones (20).

Notable runners-up include @RT_com (16), @DD_Geopolitics (16), @JohnMappin (15), @RealCandaceO (13), @alon_mizrahi (12), and @s_m_marandi (11).

The Iranian regime dominated Dugin’s content, consistently framed as a heroic civilization standing against the US-Israeli machine — the “Katechon,” in his theological vocabulary, the force holding back globalism as Antichrist. By early March Dugin was amplifying Alex Jones’s eulogy for MAGA, Joe Rogan’s bewilderment, Joe Kent’s resignation letter. His own post (quote-tweeting Jack Posobiec) called Trump the “ante-Christ.”

The through-line connecting all of it — Iran as hero, Trump as traitor, Tucker as heir — is the same thesis Dugin has been writing books about for thirty years, now made operational. What is new is the operational specificity. He’s not just philosophizing. He is picking sides, naming names, and telling his global audience which Americans to bet on.

The data doesn’t tell you what Tucker Carlson intends. But it tells you exactly what Alexander Dugin is hoping for.

Note: An initial version of this article had some inaccurate data (darn AI!). It has since been corrected. My apologies!

Key Findings:

• Candace Owens mentions Israel in 65% of her episodes, making it the #2 substantive topic on her show (behind Media/Fake News). Ben Shapiro mentions it in 61% of his.

• Tucker Carlson, Owens, and Shapiro all have similar Israel mention rates (62% vs. 65% vs. 61%), yet Shapiro produces five episodes per week, roughly double the output of the other hosts analyzed in this dataset. On a per-episode basis, Shapiro talks about Israel less than both Owens and Carlson.

• On Owens’ show, Israel gets about 71% more airtime than talk of President Trump. On Shapiro’s show, Trump gets 3.7x more airtime than Israel.

• On Megyn Kelly’s show, Israel is the 3rd most-discussed topic by word count.

If you spend any time in right-wing media discourse, you’ve heard the charge: Ben Shapiro is “Israel First.” It’s become a reflexive shorthand, a way to dismiss his commentary, question his loyalties, and cast him as an outlier among conservative voices. And Shapiro isn’t the only target. Plenty of other American commentators who dare to stand up for Israel get hit with the same label, whether it’s Mark Levin, Josh Hammer, or the good folks at the Babylon Bee.

But what if the data doesn’t support the premise?

Using Claude AI, I analyzed the full transcripts of five major conservative-adjacent podcasts from January 2025 through March 2026: Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, and Megyn Kelly. I tracked how frequently each show discusses Israel, how many words are devoted to it, and where it ranks among all topics covered. The results challenge the conventional narrative.

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The Head-to-Head Numbers

Here’s how often Israel comes up across all five shows, measured by the percentage of episodes that mention Israel at least once:

Read that again. Candace Owens mentions Israel in 65% of her episodes. Tucker Carlson mentions it in 62%. Shapiro? 61%. All three are within just a few percentage points of each other.

The Frequency Factor

There’s a detail that makes the gap even wider. Ben Shapiro publishes five episodes per week. Tucker, Candace, and Rogan publish far fewer.

That means Shapiro’s 390 episodes over this period dwarf the others’ output. When you look at raw episode count, yes, Shapiro mentioned Israel in 237 episodes. But Candace mentioned it in 146 episodes out of just 224. On a per-episode basis, Owens talks about Israel at a somewhat higher rate.

Put simply, if Shapiro published at Candace’s frequency, his Israel mentions would scale down to roughly 136 episodes — fewer than Owens, and comparable to Tucker.

Words Spoken Tell an Even Sharper Story

Episode mentions only tell you whether a topic came up at all. Word count reveals how much airtime it actually gets. The table below shows total words each host devoted to Israel across the full period, alongside their Trump word count for context. The “Israel as % of Trump” column is the key number. It tells you how much of each show’s political oxygen goes to Israel relative to its most-discussed political figure.

Shapiro devotes the most raw words to Israel, but again, he produces nearly twice as many episodes as anyone else. Adjust for output volume and his per-episode Israel word count falls well below both Tucker and Candace.

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The ratio is where the story really lives. On Shapiro’s show, Trump gets 3.7x more airtime than Israel. Israel is a secondary topic in a show that is overwhelmingly about domestic politics. On Candace’s show, Israel gets about 71% more airtime than Trump — it is the show’s center of gravity. On Tucker’s show, Israel and Trump are essentially tied for the top spot.

If the “Israel First” label belongs to anyone based on editorial emphasis, the transcripts point elsewhere.

What Each Host Actually Prioritizes

The topic rankings paint a revealing picture of each show’s editorial identity.

• Candace Owens. Israel is the #2 topic on her show by episode count (behind Media/Fake News), and the #1 topic by word count — dominating in transcript volume. From October 2025 through January 2026, virtually all of her transcribed episodes mentioned Israel. Her coverage is heavily critical, featuring interviews with Norman Finkelstein and Bassem Youssef, and episodes with titles referencing “The United States of Israel” and “World War Bibi.”

• Tucker Carlson. Israel is his #2 topic by word volume, nearly matching discussion of Trump. His coverage accelerated sharply in early 2026, driven by confrontations with Ambassador Mike Huckabee and criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

• Ben Shapiro. Israel ranks only as the 8th most frequently discussed topic on his show. His Israel coverage is highly event-driven, spiking around the June 2025 Israel-Iran war and the February–March 2026 U.S. strikes on Iran. Outside active military conflicts, Israel coverage falls off sharply, dropping to as low as 32% of episodes in December 2025. Put simply, when there is no major war involving Israel, Shapiro talks about other things.

• Joe Rogan. Israel ranks as the 13th most discussed topic on his show, coming up in about half the episodes.

• Megyn Kelly. Israel ranks as only the 18th most frequently discussed topic by episode count, but the 3rd largest by total words spoken, with coverage almost entirely concentrated in the March 2026 Iran war period.

The Point Isn’t Who’s Right About Israel

This analysis is not about the substance of anyone’s Israel commentary. It is about how shamelessly dishonest the “Israel First” charge has become. The label, applied obsessively to Shapiro and to other pro-Israel voices on the right, completely inverts reality.

Candace Owens devotes more of her show to Israel than any other substantive topic by word count. Tucker Carlson brings it up at virtually the same episode rate as Shapiro and nearly matches his total word count while producing less than half as many episodes. Even Megyn Kelly, who almost nobody thinks of as central to this discourse, ranks Israel as her No. 3 topic by total words spoken.

Shapiro talks about Israel. Fine. So do the rest of them. The difference is that only one side gets branded with a sneering loyalty smear, while the people who spend equal or greater amounts of time obsessing over Israel are treated as truth-tellers. The transcripts make clear that “Israel First” is not a data-driven critique. It is a polemical weapon for unserious people, amplified by grifters who count on nobody checking the numbers.

The numbers are what they are. And they point in a very different direction than the charge suggests.

Methodology: Full episode transcripts from January 2025 through March 2026 were analyzed using Claude AI. Topic mentions were tracked by keyword matching across transcript chunks. Some months have incomplete transcript data for certain shows, as noted in the source document.

Buckle up, I’ve got some shocking news: Iran lied.

I know. Give yourself a moment to take it in.

Of course, anyone with a functioning prefrontal cortex and even a passing relationship with reality already knows the Islamic Republic lies about everything. But the anti-American demoralization campaign has been so relentless that plenty of people have ended up talking as though Iran should be taken at its word, while Israel and the United States should be treated as the habitual deceivers.

So let’s walk through the latest lie.

Iran’s Latest Lie

For years, the Iranian regime wanted the world to believe its missile program stopped at under 2,000 kilometers (1242 miles). In late February, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said exactly that, insisting Tehran had intentionally capped its range. "We are not developing long range missiles. We have limited range to below 2,000 kilometers intentionally," he said. "We don’t want it to be a global threat. We only have [the missiles] to defend ourselves. Our missiles build deterrence."

Then over the weekend, Iran fired two intermediate-range ballistic missiles toward Diego Garcia, a joint U.S.-British base roughly 2,500 miles (approx. 4,000 kilometers) from Iran. According to the Wall Street Journal, one missile failed mid-flight, while a U.S. warship fired an SM-3 interceptor at the other. It’s still unclear whether the intercept succeeded.

This matters in the most immediate military sense. A regime that can reach Diego Garcia can threaten a far wider map of American bases, troops, and infrastructure than it admitted. It also means Europe should stop pretending geography offers some magical protection from the rest of the world. Berlin is about 2,175 miles from Tehran, Paris is about 2,610, and London is about 2,734. After a launch toward Diego Garcia, Berlin is plainly inside the demonstrated envelope, and Paris and London suddenly look a lot less theoretical.

Iran Unintentionally Justifies Operation Epic Fury

Now that Tehran has been caught lying about missile range, world governments and wayward podcasters alike need to stop treating its other strategic assurances as gospel. The same regime that lied about the reach of its ballistic missiles still wants the world to pretend its nuclear ambitions are harmless. And crazy as it sounds, some influential commentators are still eager to indulge the fiction. (Here’s looking at you, Tucker.)

This development, by itself, justifies President Trump’s decision to launch Operation Epic Fury. Recall that one of the operation’s stated objectives was destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capacity. That objective doesn’t need much explanation after this weekend. Iran’s missile program was already dangerous. Now we know its real reach was far greater than advertised. That alone is enough to treat it as a strategic threat that had to be hit.

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On March 5, Qatar’s Interior Ministry announced, via the state-run Qatar News Agency, that it had arrested 194 people of various nationalities for filming and circulating videos, as well as publishing what it called “misleading information and rumours that incite public opinion.” The statement said authorities had already taken the “necessary legal and administrative measures” and warned the public to rely exclusively on official sources for information about ongoing developments.

That language was not accidental. It closely tracks Article 136 bis of Qatar’s Penal Code, a 2020 amendment that criminalizes broadcasting or publishing “rumors,” “false or malicious news,” or “sensational propaganda” whenever authorities say it was intended to harm national interests, incite public opinion, or disturb public or social order. The offense carries up to five years in prison and a 100,000 Qatari riyal fine.

But Article 136 is only part of the system. Qatar’s 2014 Cybercrime Law separately punishes publishing “false news” online that threatens public order or state security, and even criminalizes content deemed to violate “social values or principles.” Qatar did not need to invent a pretext for this crackdown. It already had the laws in place.

And yet, almost nobody has said a word. No urgent statements. No international outrage. No meaningful pressure. Qatar can arrest 194 people for speech, call it “inciting public opinion,” and the world just shrugs. That silence is precisely what makes this kind of repression possible in the first place.

March 9 Update:

Qatar’s crackdown has already escalated further. Just days after authorities announced the arrest of 194 people for allegedly spreading “misleading information” and “inciting public opinion,” the Interior Ministry said on March 9 that the number had risen to 313.

Earlier this week, Qatar announced that it had arrested 10 IRGC members for allegedly planning attacks on its territory.

But that headline should not be mistaken for proof that Qatar and the IRGC are natural enemies. Many are understandably reluctant to criticize Qatar right now, given that it is formally aligned with Israel and the United States in Operation Epic Fury. Still, the record shows that Qatar spent years cultivating a close relationship with the Islamic Republic’s terror arm and, in key moments, helped strengthen it. This was not merely a matter of diplomatic niceties or vague gestures of goodwill. It manifested in concrete, documented military cooperation and direct financial facilitation.

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The Israeli government has long alleged that Qatar was funding the IRGC. And even if you’re skeptical of Israeli claims, the allegation was serious enough that it triggered a U.S. State Department inquiry, per the Washington Examiner (the conclusion of the department’s inquiry is unclear).

Moreover, on two separate occasions, Qatar hosted the IRGC at DIMDEX, its major naval defense expo in Doha held under state auspices. In 2022, Reuters noted IRGC commanders were openly present at the exhibition, displaying missile models and mingling at the event. Two years later, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) documented that sanctioned Iranian entities, including IRGC-linked officials, were again involved around DIMDEX in 2024, warning that Qatar continued to provide a platform alongside Western defense firms.

Then there’s the older, even more explicit military engagement.

Start with the late-2010 IRGC naval visit to Doha. According to the IRGC-linked Fars News, it conducted direct military engagement with Qatar as part of efforts to expand defense cooperation between the two countries. In one instance, the IRGC dispatched a fleet of warships — including three rocket-launcher frigates and two logistical vessels — to Qatar following the participation of Qatari military commanders in the IRGC’s Payambar-e Azam (Great Messenger) regional military exercises in the Persian Gulf. IRGC Navy officials stated that the deployment was intended to strengthen military coordination and facilitate exchanges between Iranian and Qatari naval units.

That wasn’t an isolated photo op. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) diplomatic compilation captures the broader episode, describing an IRGC naval task force arriving in Doha and being formally received, with the visit framed as a meaningful step in bilateral military ties. The same CSIS report also records the operational detail behind it. IRGC commander Ali Reza Tangsiri described the deployment as a “naval observatory mission,” involving three missile-equipped boats and two support vessels, with plans for Iranian personnel to visit Qatari military centers during the trip. The Iranian news site Fararu also wrote about this naval visit. Here’s how Army Recognition covered it:

Qatar’s side was not shy about where this was heading. Qatar’s armed forces chief Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah told the IRGC Navy delegation that Qatar was ready to hold joint military exercises with Iran. Similarly, the IRGC’s Nasseri stated that “The Islamic Republic is fully prepared for the implementation of defense cooperation agreements, and hosting and dispatching military delegations.” The Tehran Times also covered these statements.

And it wasn’t only about handshakes and drills. The Arab Weekly reports that former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Qatar paid a ransom to secure the release of IRGC fighters captured in Syria in 2012, which is exactly the kind of behind-the-scenes enabling that never shows up in Doha’s self-flattering headlines.

So yes, arresting IRGC operatives is better than not arresting them.

But the next time you hear about Qatar thwarting the IRGC — or the next time you hear about the IRGC’s latest act of violence — remember that one of the terror group’s chief enablers has been the state of Qatar.

Qatar wants the West to see it as a responsible, “moderate” mediator. Al Jazeera wants skeptics to believe the network has toned down its most inflammatory (i.e. terror-loving) instincts and matured into something closer to a conventional global broadcaster.

But it can never maintain the facade for long.

According to the official website for the 17th Al Jazeera Forum, taking place February 7 to 9, 2026 in Doha, the conference’s headline theme is “The Palestinian Cause and the Regional Balance of Power in the Context of an Emerging Multipolar World.”

On its face, that sounds like the usual nauseating, sanctimonious, academia-infused soirée one might expect from Doha. But look at the actual lineup, and the mask slips.

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Iran’s Foreign Minister Honored With Keynote Speech

Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is listed as one of the keynote speakers.

This matters because Iran is not a neutral “regional stakeholder.” It is a regime currently facing global scrutiny over the scale of its crackdown on mass protests. Multiple reports and opposition-linked monitoring groups claim that as many as 43,000 people may have been murdered overall, with roughly 30,000 killed in the span of just two days, figures that major outlets note are difficult to independently verify due to internet shutdowns and information controls.

So yes, Qatar is giving a keynote platform to Iran’s top diplomat while the world is still sorting through the scale of one of the bloodiest internal crackdowns in recent history.

Opening Session: Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal

The program lists Khaled Meshaal, described plainly as “Head of Hamas abroad,” as a featured speaker in the conference’s opening session, titled “Gaza after Two Years of War: The Resistance Project, Occupation Plans and Prospects for Internationalisation.” Meshaal is one of two frontrunners gunning (pun intended) for the leadership of the entire terrorist organization.

Other Senior Officials Speaking at the Forum

• Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, President of Somalia (keynote speaker)

• Burhanettin Duran, head of Türkiye’s Directorate of Communications (keynote speaker)

• Sheikh Nasser bin Faisal Al Thani, Director General of Al Jazeera Media Network and a member of Qatar’s ruling Al Thani royal family (keynote speaker)

• Rima Hassan, member of the European Parliament (keynote speaker)

• Saeed Khatibzadeh, Iran’s deputy foreign minister

It’s worth noting that the Al Jazeera Forum has a history of adding speakers as the event date approaches, suggesting the final lineup may expand further.

Addittional Speakers

On Day Two, Session Four, the program turns to “accountability and the rule of law” in a “multipolar world,” featuring Fatou Bensouda, the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

Other speakers include Omar Makki, the Regional Legal Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Committee of the Red Cross; Abdullah Al-Aryan, Professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar; and Ghassan Abu Sittah, a prominent figure in conflict medicine and Gaza advocacy who also serves as the Rector of the University of Glasgow.

Not Hiding the Ball

Qatar can keep insisting it’s “moderate.” But the Al Jazeera Forum tells a simpler story. All we need to do is listen to them in their own words.

If you’re wondering what Qatar is selling here, don’t overthink it. The conference theme says “multipolar world.” The speaker list says “Khaybar khaybar, ya yahud.”

Qatar’s annual Doha Forum will take place on December 6–7, and its newly released agenda shows a speaker lineup and session slate heavily focused on Israel and Gaza. Nearly half of all scheduled panels contain direct references to Israeli “crimes” in Gaza and Iran, and ALL of them align with Qatari and Iranian talking points. Among the speakers are Qatar’s Prime Minister, Iranian officials, and a cavalcade of anti-American actors.

None of that is surprising — this is Doha, the capital of the Muslim Brotherhood, after all.

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What’s (only slightly) more surprising is that two high-profile American attendees are Neil Patel, the CEO of the Tucker Carlson Network, and Omeed Malik, the network’s earliest financial backer and founder of 1789 Capital. While Malik is listed as the founder of 1789 Capital, Patel is listed in his official capacity as head of Carlson’s media operation, a notable choice for a conference funded and hosted by the Qatari government.

The forum will also host Javad Zarif, Iran’s former foreign minister and one of the regime’s most prominent propagandists on the global stage. Another pro-Iran mainstay on the program is Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council and a leading advocate for Tehran’s interests in Washington. As Tablet Magazine previously reported, internal emails and documents showed Parsi and NIAC coordinating with Iranian regime officials, including arranging meetings between members of Congress and Iran’s ambassador to the U.N.

A separate Iranian-diaspora watchdog report detailed NIAC’s long record of advocacy aligned with Tehran’s goals, including dissident testimony describing the group as a de-facto PR arm for the regime. The report also notes that a federal judge sanctioned Parsi and NIAC for withholding evidence during their failed defamation lawsuit.

Also gracing the stage will be Wael al-Dahdouh, the head of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau who is also an alleged member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization.

Across the two-day schedule, themes related to Israel, Gaza, and Iran dominate the agenda. Major global issues such as Russia, China, energy markets, and economic development appear far less frequently. Topics that do appear tend to be framed around the Middle East, and highlight Qatar’s supposedly “well-intentioned diplomatic” efforts.

The conference sessions are exactly what you’d expect. One panel, titled “The Gaza Reckoning: Reassessing Global Responsibilities and Pathways to Peace,” says it will examine the war through the lens of global accountability. Another, “Iran and the Changing Regional Security Environment,” falsely claims Israel initiated the 12-Day-War with Iran, when in reality, Israel was simply responding to over a year of Iranian missle attacks on its territory. A third session, “Reclaiming Agency in International Media,” says it will focus on Gaza and the media’s role in shaping narratives surrounding the conflict.

Speaking of media, the forum’s media partners include only two Western outlets: CNN and Foreign Policy. CNN’s involvement has drawn scrutiny before. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, the network recently established an office in Doha, with Qatar footing the bill.

Qatar markets the Doha Forum as a platform for diplomacy, dialogue, and global cooperation. The 2025 program suggests a clear effort to shape international discourse around the Gaza war, Iranian interests, and Qatar’s regional positioning.

…….So why the hell are Tucker Carlson’s business partners there?

And exhale.

The collective breath of relief across Israel is almost impossible to describe. After 738 days of torment, it’s finally October 8.

The overwhelming joy that our hostages are now free. The anxiety of bloodthirsty terrorists released back to our doorstep as part of the ceasefire deal. The immeasurable gratitude to President Trump, who defied all conventional wisdom to show the world the true greatness of America. And just a hint of vindication — that our war, our just war, yielded the results we once thought we could only dream of.

For two years, since even before the IDF entered Gaza in late October 2023, we were accused of committing genocide. We were told we sought to annihilate innocent women and children, painted as Nazis by smug commentators and corrupt UN officials who demanded we simply surrender to the Hamas death cult.

Their accusations gave way to sanctions and arrest warrants for our elected leaders; to Israelis being excluded from international events; to Jews being pogrom’ed on the streets of Europe; and to Iranian missiles striking the heart of our cities.

The trauma has been relentless. Yet we did not waver. How could we, when our hostages endured horrors we could hardly imagine? So we remained resolute, clinging to the sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe, we would see them dance again. That hope and resilience makes us who we are.

That doesn’t mean we aren’t filled with righteous anger. For two long years, the international media told us our fight was futile. That if we only allowed Palestinians to declare a state, Hamas would kindly free the hostages out of the goodness of their hearts. That we should stop fighting evil and instead appease it. They were wrong.

And that doesn’t mean we aren’t worried. Amid our euphoria, we are already bracing for what may come next. Many of the 1,900 Palestinian detainees and security prisoners just released into Gaza and the West Bank have Israeli blood on their hands. They will harm us again if given the chance. Hamas, despite assurances from its patrons in Qatar that it seeks a “new chapter” with Israel, has already begun reconstituting its forces and blatantly violating the ceasefire by withholding the bodies of hostages they murdered, who were guaranteed would be released. As we speak, Hamas is executing Palestinians in Gaza en masse, and there is no clear mechanism to demilitarize them. We know this moment is a respite, not an end. We know we will again have to take up arms against those who seek our destruction.

To those abroad insisting this deal could have happened sooner: it could not have. Only Israel’s courageous campaign in Gaza, including the dismantling of Hamas’s military machine, the destruction of its tunnel empire, and the elimination of its leadership, created the leverage for this agreement. Only Trump’s diplomacy, combined with Israel’s battlefield victories, made it possible. Peace is not conjured by handshakes and lofty words on paper; it is compelled by strength.

This is not the end of our war for survival; it’s a brief breath between battles. Israelis understand that freedom and safety are not permanent conditions. They are achievements that must be won again and again.

But we won’t be thinking about that tonight.

Tonight, as we sit with our families around the dinner table, we marvel at what was just accomplished. We pray for the return of every last soldier, and for the souls whom we could not save in time.

Tonight, on the two-year anniversary of the massacre that shook our world and made us hold our breath — we’re finally dancing again.

On October 2nd, I published an article detailing Qatar’s vast foreign influence network in the U.S., including its army of foreign agents operating at the regime’s behest. The piece ruffled some feathers, such as Qatar’s Deputy Ambassador to the U.S., Hamad Al-Mufta, who lashed out against it. When Former Spokesman for the State of Israel Eylon Levy’s post about the article went viral, Al-Mufta responded:

“All fara [Foreign Agents Registration Act] registered and very transparent And more to come to fight the disinformation and elevate the Qatari USA relationships as this relationships is the the one that creat peace and economic prosperity in the USA. [sic]”

It sounds nice, but it’s a blatant lie. Qatar’s foreign influence activity is not “all registered and transparent.” In September 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered AJ+, a Washington-based subsidiary of Al Jazeera, to register as a foreign agent under FARA. Trump’s DOJ laid out in black and white how AJ+ is controlled from top to bottom by the Qatari government. Five years later, and AJ+ has simply refused to register — in complete violation of American law.

So I asked Al-Mufta directly: What about AJ+? Why hasn’t it complied with the DOJ order? He refused to answer. I asked again. Silence. I tweeted at him a third time. Nothing. The deputy ambassador of Qatar — confronted with hard facts — simply vanished.

That’s the pattern, you see. Doha’s officials lie in public, and when called out, they retreat.

And here’s a revealing coda. After I exposed Al-Mufta’s dishonesty, an anonymous user on X pointed out that the only account he personally pays to subscribe to is none other than Jackson Hinkle — arguably the biggest professional liar on the platform. Which means Qatar’s deputy ambassador is literally funding Hinkle, at least in the form of that subscription.

So the next time you see Qatari diplomats brag about their “transparency,” remember this: they bankroll propagandists, they ignore U.S. law, and when exposed, they hide.

Key Takeaways

• Qatar has 31 FARA registrants in the U.S., with 22 based in Washington, D.C. — a 71% concentration, the highest of any major lobbying country.

• Since 2016, Qatar has spent nearly $250M on 88 lobbying and PR firms, logging 627 in-person political meetings from 2021–25 — more than any other country.

• Its total U.S. footprint is $93.7B, including $30B in business investments, $29B in weapons purchases, $20B in energy projects, $8B for Al Udeid Air Base, and $6.3B in higher education.

• Qatar is the single largest foreign funder of U.S. universities at $6.3 billion. The D.C.-based Georgetown has recieved $1 billion since 2005.

• Qatari influence also permeates D.C. media and real estate: Al Jazeera holds 136 congressional press credentials (vs. 82 for the New York Times), and Qatari Diar owns the 2-million-sq-ft CityCenterDC project under Sharia rules.

Yet Another Ginned up Controversy Over Israel

Over the last few days, my feed has been flooded with people suddenly discovering FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and using it as a cudgel against Israel. Overnight, everyone who couldn’t even tell you what FARA stood for became an expert, righteously insisting that Israel’s “nefarious foreign influence” had finally been exposed.

The latest controversy started with the Soros-funded, Iran-linked Quincy Institute, which claimed influencers were being paid $7,000 per post by an Israeli lobby group. But if you actually read the filings, the real figure is $450–$750 per post — a perfectly normal mid-tier influencer rate, as data wiz Mark Zlochin (a must-follow) pointed out. Some on the Tucker Carlson wing of the GOP, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, argued that any influencer being paid by a foreign lobbyist should register under FARA (a point I actually agree with).

The narrative didn’t stop there. Almost immediately, fringe antisemites on the bowels of X began pumping out the false figure as “proof” that D.C. is under Israel’s thumb.

Let’s be clear: every single country tries to influence the United States, and they all use influencers to do it. Without exception. Is it a smart strategy? Meh, I’m not convinced. Personally, I think the risks outweigh the rewards, and I haven’t seen data proving otherwise. Qatar certainly seems to think so though, given how the Wall Street Journal revealed in 2018 that Qatar had targeted 250 influencers to try and sway Trump’s policy in their preferred direction.

That brings us to the main point. The real story isn’t whether countries do this — it’s about which countries many on both sides of the aisle are ignoring.

Because while the spotlight is being forced onto Israel, the real story is Qatar, whose sprawling foreign influence apparatus dwarfs everyone else’s. Yet curiously, few of these sudden FARA “experts” have said a word about the regime, even after President Trump signed an executive order effectively granting the Gulf terror state NATO-like security guarantees from the U.S. — guarantees that could, in theory, drag American citizens into war on behalf of Doha.

Qatar’s FARA Footprint

Here’s the basic landscape. As of today, there are 788 active FARA registrants in the United States (access full FARA database here). From what I could see, Japan has the most active registrants overall at 53, but proportionally Qatar has the highest concentration of FARA agents in Washington, D.C. and its surrounding area among countries with a significant lobbying presence.

• Israel: 16 total, with 8 based in D.C. (50%)

• UAE: 27 total, 11 in D.C. (40.7%)

• Saudi Arabia: 38 total, 15 in D.C. (39.5%)

• Japan: 53 total, about 30 in D.C. (56.6%)

• Qatar: 31 total, 22 in D.C. (71.0%)

Moreover, the data also shows that since Trump’s first election in 2016, Qatar has spent nearly $250 million on 88 FARA-registered lobbying and PR firms. From 2021–2025 alone, Qatar’s agents reported 627 in-person meetings with U.S. political contacts — more than any other country in the world.

Critics love to claim that Israel “buys” Washington. The numbers tell a different story. According to OpenSecrets, here are the top spenders on FARA registerants since 2016. As you can see, China has spent the most, at about $460 million, Qatar $258 million, and Israel $194. So when you hear talking points about “Israel buying influence,” remember: the country actually flooding D.C. with cash and lobbyists is Qatar.

These lobbiysts and PR firms were well worth the investment. Earlier this year, the Washington Examiner’s Robert Schmad exposed that since Trump’s 2024 win, Qatar has ramped up efforts to sway conservative media, with over half its foreign-agent outreach now targeting right-leaning outlets (up from ~10% before). This includes paying $180k per month to a firm that secured a Tucker Carlson interview for the Qatari prime minister and pitching favorable stories to Fox, the New York Post, and others — some of which ran soon after.

Somewhat relatedly, in March 2024, reports emerged that a Qatari royal invested about $50 million in pro-Trump network Newsmax, leading senior newsroom staff to pressure reporters to soften coverage of Qatar. The investment, structured via a Cayman Islands corporate entity, represented a significant minority stake.

The $93.7 Billion Footprint

Lobbying is just the beginning. According to The Free Press, Qatar’s overall U.S. footprint adds up to $93.7 billion, broken down like this:

• Business investments: $30 billion

• Weapons purchases: $29 billion

• Energy plants and export facilities: $20 billion

• Al Udeid Air Base: $8 billion

• Lobbying and PR: $250 million

• Colleges and universities: $6.3 billion

That last figure is astonishing. Qatar is the single largest foreign funder of U.S. colleges and universities in history. The next closest? China and Hong Kong at $5.6 billion. Germany follows with $4.2 billion, England with $4.1 billion, and Saudi Arabia/Canada at $3.7 billion.

Qatar blows them all away.

Six major U.S. universities still operate campuses in Qatar: Virginia Commonwealth, Cornell, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and Northwestern (though Texas A&M is withdrawing in a couple of years).

• Georgetown University (main campus in Washington, D.C.) has received over $1 billion.

• Northwestern University has taken around $800 million.

• Texas A&M once had $700 million, until their contract was canceled last year.

D.C. Capture

Qatar’s influence isn’t abstract. It’s quite literally physically all over Washington.

• Al Jazeera’s subsidiary AJ+, based in D.C., was ordered by the DOJ in 2020 to register as a foreign agent. Five years later, it still hasn’t — and the DOJ has failed (or refused?) to enforce its own order.

• Speaking of Al Jazeera, the Qatari government-run outlet also has unrivaled access on Capitol Hill. Congressman Jack Bergman revealed in 2024 that Al Jazeera and its subsidiaries hold 136 congressional press credentials. The New York Times only has 82.

• The DOJ itself is now headed by Pam Bondi, who was once a registered foreign agent of Qatar and helped polish Doha’s image ahead of the 2022 World Cup.

• And let’s not forget real estate: the sprawling CityCenterDC development — 2 million square feet across five city blocks — is majority owned by Qatari Diar, which allegedly required the project to adhere to Sharia finance principles (equity investment only, no interest) and imposing restrictions on banks, bars, and certain businesses.

The Bottom Line

The numbers don’t lie. Qatar is:

• Spending far more than Israel on lobbying.

• Pumping billions into U.S. universities.

• Enjoying extraordinary media access.

• Embedding itself directly into Washington real estate.

Yet when the FARA conversation comes up, the outrage is laser-focused on Israel — where the actual numbers don’t even come close.

And before all the naysayers start whining about “AIPAC operating as an unregistered foreign agent” or some such nonsense, let me remind you: Washington is full of organizations advocating for strong U.S. ties with Greece (HALC), Armenia (ANCA), Ireland (Irish Caucus networks), India (USINPAC), and Taiwan (FAPA). Yet the outrage always seems saved just for AIPAC.

Any honest conversation about foreign influence in Washington has to start with the country that’s been pouring billions into U.S. politics, universities, media, and even the capital city itself. That country is Qatar.

There is something profoundly sinister happening right now in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. It is not just that we’ve lost a husband, a father, a leader, a friend. It’s that his very memory is now being put on trial. And if you pay attention to the online currents, on both the left and the right, you’ll see the attempt unfolding in real time to rewrite who Charlie Kirk was, what he believed, and what he fought for.

You see it in the whispers and the outright lies. They say Charlie was “waking up” to the supposed evils of Israel, that he was beginning to notice “the Jews this” and “the Jews that.” They try to twist him into the image of a man who was slowly inching toward their conspiratorial worldview.

Charlie’s record could not be clearer. He said, plainly, that antisemitism is from the pit of hell. He called it demonic. He warned that it rots your brain. Again and again, he defended Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. He spoke with joy about one of his greatest callings as a Christian: to advocate for Israel and to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish people. He pushed back against the conspiracism festering in parts of the right. He knew the danger of it. He called it out.

And now some of the very people he was warning against — people like Candace Owens and her ilk — are rushing in to claim him as their own. They are trying to fold him into the very movement he resisted, to tarnish his memory with their poison, to pretend that he was quietly “coming around” to their side.

When do people truly die? Yes, there is the physical death, the awful finality we are all grieving now. But there is also the second death — the death that comes when a person’s memory is extinguished, when their legacy is distorted beyond recognition, when the truth of their life is buried under lies. That second death is what these fiends are attempting to inflict on Charlie Kirk right now.

He hasn’t even been laid to rest. His wife and children are still processing the unbearable reality of losing him. And yet here are the grifters and the ideologues, already at work, trying to kill him again. Not in flesh, but in spirit.

It is one of the most vile things I have ever witnessed. And it cannot go unchallenged.

Charlie Kirk was an extraordinary friend to Israel and to the Jewish people. He was consistent. He was clear. He was courageous. And for anyone to twist his legacy into something it never was, to drag his name into the muck of antisemitic conspiracism, is not only obscene. It is demonic.

And it is our responsibility to stop it.

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The New York Times editorial board just weighed in with a demand that Israel allow international media into Gaza.

Now, one might argue that Israel should let some of the press waltz into Gaza and galavant with the Hamas terrorists they seem to admire so much. But regardless of whether Israel decides to alter its policy, the New York Times should not be granted entry. Given the systematic, deliberate campaign the paper has waged since October 7th to harm Israel, its demands should be dismissed. It’s high time for the Times to face the consequences of its actions.

Anyways, let’s walk through just a few examples of the Times’ profound abdication of journalistic integrity, shall we?

The Starving Gaza Baby Hoax

In July 2025, the Times splashed across its front page a photo of an emaciated Gazan child—whose condition was caused not by wartime starvation, but by pre-existing cerebral palsy. The image was presented as proof of famine caused by Israel. The correction—such as it was—was buried days later, long after the damage was done. This was no isolated lapse. It was the latest expression of a decades-long pattern of skewed, selective, and at times outright false reporting about Israel.

A Pattern of Negligent, Inaccurate Journalism

A 2024 peer-reviewed study by Eytan Gilboa and Lilac Sigan, published in Israel Affairs, examined the Times’s coverage of the Israel–Hamas war from October 7, 2023, to June 7, 2024. In that period, the paper admitted to 72 errors—48 of them about Israel. Not a single one was caught internally; all were flagged by outside critics. Corrections were late, vague, and often misleading.

The most infamous case was the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion. On October 17, 2023, the Times led with: “Israeli airstrike killed 500 at a Gaza hospital, Palestinians say.” In one sentence were five major falsehoods: it wasn’t an Israeli airstrike but a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket; it hit a parking lot, not the hospital; the death toll was 50–100, not 500; the source was Hamas’s “Ministry of Health,” not some generic “Palestinians.” The headline helped ignite riots across the Middle East and torpedoed a Biden-brokered summit in Amman. Israel immediately released audio of PIJ operatives admitting responsibility. The Times buried Israel’s denial under the original headline and left it there for hours. When the “correction” finally came, it was a minor note about the parking lot damage—no mention of PIJ, Hamas, or the actual casualty count. Only after President Biden privately blasted the headline as “irresponsible” did the paper issue an editor’s note admitting it had “relied too heavily” on Hamas claims.

The Gilboa–Sigan study documents that this wasn’t a one-time lapse. Throughout the war, the Times repeated Gaza Health Ministry casualty figures almost daily without noting the ministry is run by Hamas, without distinguishing combatants from civilians, and without acknowledging analyses that showed those figures were statistically impossible. Hamas itself later admitted that a third of its reported casualties were drawn from “media sources” or “unclear individuals.” The Times ignored that until the UN repeated it, and even then portrayed it as a mere change in sourcing. In 27 opinion pieces about Gaza casualties, the paper never once questioned Hamas’s numbers, according to Gilboa and Sigan’s study.

The same pattern held in its treatment of Israeli leaders’ words. On October 10, 2023, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told soldiers, “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” The Times removed the reference to Hamas, turning a statement about eradicating a terror group into one about erasing Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu quoted a biblical passage about surprise attacks on the innocent; the Times misattributed it to a completely different verse with an entirely different meaning. Both misquotes were repeated in op-eds, influencing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, before being partially corrected—weeks later in some cases, not at all in others.

And then there’s the question of who the Times trusts to tell the story from Gaza. The paper rehired Soliman Hijjy, a freelancer it had previously fired for antisemitic posts praising Adolf Hitler, and used his work in 13 articles, including the false hospital-blast report. It employed Yousef Masoud, accused of embedding with Hamas on October 7, whose photo metadata showed it was taken just 11 minutes after the attack began—contradicting the Times’s claim of a 90-minute delay.

The Times also uses the work of Samar Abu Elouf, a Gaza-based freelancer who, in the early 2010s, taught “journalism” courses for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

In December 2023, the Times published an op-ed by Yahya Sarraj, the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza City. The piece repeated Hamas casualty claims and destruction figures without challenge. The backlash was immediate and bipartisan, with U.S. leaders blasting the Times for giving a propaganda platform to a Hamas official.

Moreover, a Tablet Magazine analysis found that the number of Times articles pairing “Israel” and “genocide” during the war was more than nine times higher than the paper’s peak mentions of genocide in Rwanda and nearly six times higher than during Darfur. This isn’t the cautious use of a grave legal term—it’s hyperbolic repetition, designed to imprint a frame in the public mind.

Israel’s restrictions on press access to Gaza are hardly unusual. From Afghanistan to Iraq and many other conflicts, governments fighting terror groups have routinely barred or tightly controlled journalists in active combat zones. Israel’s policy is not an outlier — it is consistent with global counter-terror operations.

But even if one argues that international media should be allowed in, the New York Times has no claim to that privilege. By spreading hoaxes, platforming Hamas officials, intentionally spreading misinformation, maliciously editing quotes from Israeli officials, and employing terror-linked, Hitler-loving “journalists,” it has forfeited the credibility required to cover Gaza responsibly.

Screw em.

On Friday, the Qatari state-run network Al Jazeera announced two new correspondents to replace Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqea, who were killed last week in an Israeli airstrike: Shadi Shamiya and Nour Abu Rukba.

Anas, by every available piece of evidence and according to the Israel Defense Forces, was a Hamas terrorist. Qreiqea, too, appeared tied to the group. It should therefore surprise no one that Shadi Shamiya is cut from the same cloth.

Before joining Al Jazeera, he served as head of the correspondents’ department at Al-Aqsa TV, Hamas’ flagship propaganda channel, which has been sanctioned by the U.S. government. In other words, a card-carrying Hamas operative.

And while Shadi keeps his own social media presence relatively sanitized, his wife, Wafaa Abdel Karim, is less discreet. She openly flaunts her admiration for Hamas and jihad. On Facebook, she posted “O Allah, grant victory to our fighters and protect them, O Allah. Destroy the Jews and their supporters, O Lord of the worlds.” She’s posted Hamas propaganda straight from the Qassam Brigades on multiple occasions. (See here, here, and here, for example.)

Publicly available info about Nour appears limited at this point. I’ve identified an X account and two Instagram pages seemingly associated with her (here and here), but none contain any noteworthy material aside from the usual anti-Israel propaganda. Will update if I find anything interesting.

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